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Authors pen their second book

Sandi Van Orden

Updated:
Dec. 20, 2007, 5:02 a.m.

Three local authors have recently released their most recent collaborative work.

Brian Holt, a teacher at Effingham County High School, Clay Kight, a senior at ECHS, and Josh Patterson, an alum of ECHS, have released “Walking with God: Lessons Learned through God’s Faithfulness.”

The book is the second collaborative effort for Holt and Kight. The two released “Dear Mom and Dad” earlier in the year.

“It took a really long time, longer than we thought to get everything together to organize to get it to be one— different chapters but one story,” Patterson said.

Kight said it was interesting with the first book to blend writing styles, and with this book adding an additional voice made it interesting “getting everyone on the same page of what the tone of the book was going to be.”

Holt said the book has individual stories illustrating the impact God has had on the lives of the three authors.

“While our voices are the same in telling a story about the impact that God has had on each of our lives,” Holt said.

“Each story has its own voice because the three of us are different and have had completely different experiences, but yet it’s the same God.”

Holt said the stories show how God impacted situations through the authors, or what they were able to learn from the various experiences.

Kight said it was exciting to have three people who have lived different lives work on the book.

“(We have) come to a point now that we can all acknowledge what God has done in our lives. We’re just hoping that people can connect,” he said.

Kight said some of the stories are about doing things not because they wanted to.

“(We were) not always being open to what God was calling us to do in our lives, but then through a course of events realizing that something we should probably be doing,” Kight said.

Patterson said there are times the three learned not because of the events, but in spite of them.

Holt said it shows, “that God really does have a plan, and a purpose for each one of us in every situation that we go through.”

There have been some new challenges with this book.

“I think that the biggest difference was working with a national group of people who knew what they were doing with publishing,” Kight said.

He said he is more pleased with the look and quality of the book compared to the first.

Holt said the approach of the book was different.

“With the first book, it was on a print by print basis,” he said. “In this case, using a national printer, we tell them the order that we need. There are a lot more hurdles to jump through from pre-press editing, to typesetting issues things that with the first book we handled on our own. This time, we had to go in some cases two or three times back and forth for approval and cover design and that sort of thing.”

Holt said it was a bigger book, with more people involved, and more time in the printing process. There were also delays because of the fires in California.

Even with the three authors in different location — Patterson is a freshman at the University of Georgia, Kight is dually enrolled at Armstrong University, and Holt is at ECHS — the three are working on new projects.

Holt said the three are working on a devotional book.

Kight said there is another book in the development stages with a working title of “Teen Outbreak.”

“I would think people could reasonably expect to see another book out by us before summer,” Kight said.

Holt said the best way to purchase a copy of the book is by going to the group’s Web site khpmediagroup.com.